Transcription
What’s going on, everyone? Dave here from profitable tools. Today I’m looking at a brand new platform to help you sell digital products online. It is called lemon squeezy. This is my first look at the platform, and honestly, they’re still very early on, but what I’ve seen so far is impressive.
If you’re looking at an easy and quick way to set up an online store to sell digital products, you’ll definitely want to use, stay tuned. So this is my first look at Lemon Squeezy. As you can see from the headline here, it’s going to help you sell digital products easier, the easy peasy way, as they say. And if you’ve followed my channel at all before, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of self hosted platforms. And Lemon Squeezy is kind of the opposite of that.
It is a software as a service, kind of an all in one solution to help you sell digital products. It’s going to help you sell digital downloads, subscriptions. Later on. I know they’re going to add in things like courses that is not there quite yet. This is early on in Lemon Squeezy’s days.
So we’ll probably check back in as they update with more features, assuming it’s good as we get into it here. I really was kind of skeptical of a product like this, and it came up over on the Facebook group. Some developers that I really like and I respect their quality of development, said, you know what, if something like Lemon Squeezy existed when we launched our products, we probably would have used it. Primarily the reason I got was because it’ll handle the international tax laws for you. So if you’re selling worldwide, it can be a little overwhelming, especially if you’re a small shop, to handle all of the different tax laws, especially with EU VAT tax.
Needing to have different requirements in each country that you sell in can be very overwhelming for a small person or a small company. And this is going to take care of it for you. You can see they’ve got a ton of testimonials here already, even though it’s very early on in the product. I got to say, I like the design of this page particularly. I think they have some fairly decent copy.
They’re not just talking about features, they’re explaining the benefits of the features. That is something that I see a lot of software companies making a mistake with. Let’s take a quick look at the pricing before I log in. So we’ve got two plans available right now. Fresh is their free plan, and then we have Sweet, which is their $29 a month plan.
Later on, they’re going to be releasing Juicy, which is going to be $79 a month. Let’s get into the differences here between Fresh and Sweet. Essentially, you’re looking at paying a larger chunk per transaction or moving up to a smaller chunk per transaction, but a flat monthly fee. So they’re going to be able to accept credit cards here. 3.5% is not a terrible credit card rate.
It’s not a stellar rate either, but I think it’s very reasonable considering all of the features they’re going to provide. Just scrolling through the features here quickly, you’ll notice that the Fresh and the Sweet plan here are basically identical. They’re going to have the same amount of features. You’re really just paying that extra transaction fee. So maybe you’re getting started.
You use Fresh and then as some sales come in, you can switch over to suite. Now, the one thing that they are going to include in suite, which is not available yet, is they have some email marketing in the pipeline. And these things actually make me a little bit nervous when I see a platform try to accomplish too much too soon. They’re talking about email marketing, marketing automation, affiliate programs, live chat, a website builder. I mean, they really are planning to be the entire infrastructure for your business.
That is a lot to tackle. So selling digital products is one thing, but I am very, very skeptical, but yet excited to see what they do for everything else. All right, so I’ve just created my new account here. You can see it’s called Profitable Tools in the Corner and they give me a nice little checklist of things to do. The first thing they want me to do is to create my first product.
So let’s go ahead and do that together. So I’m going to be launching my first course soon. I’m not planning to actually use Lens and squeeze you to sell it, but let’s go through the process as though I were. Now I’m going to call this mastering modic. That’s the name of my course and I can give it a short description here.
All right. I just gave it a short description, learned everything you need to install, set up, and maximize your profit with the self hosted marketing automation platform Moddic. Not a great description, but it’s going to fit their range of 120 to 160 characters. So I’m good with that for now. In terms of pricing, I can choose a one time fee or a subscription.
You can see here I can set my price. Let’s say I wanted to make it $79. I could do that and allow customers to pay what they want. If I turn this on, then I could set a minimum price and a suggested price and people can pay whatever they like. If you want to charge a subscription, you can definitely do that.
You can see you set a price over here and repeat the payments every one month, every one day, every one week, so on and so forth. In the media section here, I can upload my images. Think about the classic ecommerce setup. You’re on Amazon browsing through the different images of a product. You’d upload those all right here you can make them up to ten megabytes each and add ten images Total to The Product in The Files Section.
These are going to be your deliverables. So after someone makes a purchase, if it’s a digital product, they’ll get access to these files. There is no limit on how many files you can upload. Just a five gigabyte limit total. So you can only make your products five gigs in size.
Now, keep in mind that the online course feature is coming later. I’m talking about selling an online course right now. But it would really be more of just a digital download of the video files to have a proper online course infrastructure. They’re going to add that in later. Right now.
At this time, lemon squeezy is best set up for people who want to sell digital downloads. Maybe you’re selling PDFs, individual videos or even WordPress plugins, because they do have a licensing structure that we can add in later, but I wouldn’t recommend it necessarily. If you want to give someone a great online learning experience at this time. All right, I’m going to add some media and files in here so we can see what that looks like. Okay, so I just uploaded my thumbnail.
I’m going to upload just one video from the course. The course is actually huge. I don’t think it would even fit within this five gigabyte total. But just to see what the experience is like. The upload is going very quickly and should have no problems here at all.
All Right, so our Upload is done here. Let’s move on to the next section, which is variants. So the idea here, typically, in E WooCommerce, a variant would be something like different colors of a product or different sizes. But since we’re only able to sell digital products here, it’s probably going to be more like extra features. So maybe you have a version of your software that has more features than another version, a lower price option and a higher priced option.
Those would be examples of variant. All Right. Down here, we have the option to generate a license. If I turn this on, I can choose a license length and activation limit, so maybe they can activate it on a certain number of devices. And I can also set it to day, month or year.
So I could have it be a monthly recurring license or have it be unlimited and have it be an unlimited license. CSS hero you go. If you want to sell your unlimited lifetime version of a product, you can use this tool to set it up. And finally, we can also redirect them after purchase so you can send users to a URL of your choice. All right?
If you turn that on, you just get the option to enter in the URL. All right. We’re looking pretty good here. I’m going to go ahead and publish this product. Okay, so the product is now Published.
I’ve still got the product page open over here, I think just from a UX experience. I’d love to see that kind of disappear after I hit publish. But I can see my list of products right here. I can add as many products as I want to repeat this process. Just click the plus button, add a product.
Or we can also add a discount. Let’s actually check that out right now. So this is how you add discount codes. So there’s some general questions here. What is the name of the code?
What is the actual code itself? And then what does the discount look like? Do you have a percentage discount or a flat amount discount? So a dollar amount? You can, of course, make the coupon codes apply to specific products.
So if I turn this on, I can search for my specific product that I want to create a coupon code for. I can set the limit of the number of redemptions. This applies to all customers, not per customer. Important to note. So the same person would be able to redeem the coupon multiple times and then finally we get the option to apply the discount every month.
This would actually maybe be phrased a little better because this is about subscriptions, right? So whether or not you have it set to be a yearly or a monthly or even a daily subscription, that discount would reapply every month. Typically, it’s very uncommon. You’ll see that first year discounted for a lot of software, and then after that they charge full, full price. That is kind of the most common thing you’ll see.
All right, I’m going to X out of this because I’m not actually going to add a discount in yet. Back over to my products page here. If I wanted to share this product, there is a share button right here. I can click on that and it shows me what it’s going to look like when someone visits this page. I really like the style of this.
It has a nice kind of stripe looking user interface, so it makes me feel secure as a user. Note that the product image is slightly cropped here. That’s because I did not follow their advice to upload a four by three product image. So it does crop the edges here. That’s entirely my fault.
I ignored their advice. Of course, if I’m not happy with the look of this checkout page, I can customize it a little bit. I can turn off the store logo, which I actually haven’t added one yet. So we’ll have to do that in a second. We can show the product media that’s going to be our images that we uploaded.
Of course I’m going to want that on Product description. I can hide if I don’t want it to display the product name, I can turn off that’s a little bit weird. It actually doesn’t look like it’s hiding it or really changing much at all. Let’s see what is going with the cardholder name. So that is interesting.
I don’t know why you’d not want to have the person’s name who’s checking out. It’s this field right here. I’d recommend leaving that on and the discount code. So if you wanted to hide that box, that is probably a good idea because if you have that discount code box, there a decent chunk of people are going to start searching for discount codes online, and if they can’t find them, that might actually prevent them from purchasing. So I highly recommend hiding that unless you actually have a discount code for people to use.
So what we’re looking at right now is called the checkout link. I can actually copy this, open it up in a new tab, and we can make a purchase. Right now there’s no further configuration I need to do. That’s a really nice thing. I didn’t have to go set up an account with Stripe, get my of keys, connect the dots.
It’s all kind of just done for me by lemon squeezy. Of course, they’re also going to be accountable for collecting taxes. Like I mentioned early on. That is really a nice load off your mind. You don’t have to worry about all of the administrative features.
So I really dig this so far. It’s quite easy to use. There is some light branding here. It says Powered by lemon squeezy. That doesn’t particularly bother me in this case.
If it were something like email marketing, I think it would be a little bit more intrusive where you’re sending out emails to customers and it says Powered by lemon squeezy. We’ll have to see how they implement that. But as far as a checkout page, we’re kind of used to seeing that big cartel paddle. All of these different checkout processes typically have their logo branded on them somewhere. I think Square does that as well.
Not really a big deal to me. So that was the checkout link. Our other option here is called the checkout overlay. If I click on this, you’re going to see that this is like a little pop up field that can show up. So I can choose to pay by card pay.
With PayPal, people can log in and of course use PayPal credit then as well, most likely depending on how your product is set up or your relationship with PayPal. We have card details here. Kind of just everything you’d expect to see. Get the artwork right here, the store logo right there. So I can toggle that off because I don’t have a logo uploaded.
The only other real design option here is to use a dark background. So I like this look. It kind of grays out everything in the background. So let’s say you put a button on your page and when people click it, it pops up this overlay. I like that.
It would black out everything else around it. All right, there you go. That’s how you set up a product. And now you’re ready to sell it. If you are selling directly on social media or via email, you could just copy this link and share that people will be able to click and buy right away.
If you have a website already and you just want to allow people to purchase from your website, you could get away with using a button and then adding in this little bit of JavaScript so that a pop up shows up and people can buy right on your website with an overlay. Now I’ve gone ahead and just changed the price of this product to be $0.50 so that I can actually go through the ordering experience without wasting a lot of money here. And let’s go ahead and check it out and see what it looks like to actually make a purchase. Okay, so I am paying via credit card right now and just one little user experience optimization that I see possible. I really like when you go ahead and you enter in your zip code when it completes your city and state for you.
I find that a great convenience and this is not doing that. In fact, I actually typed in my state and it told me that the state field is required there. It went away finally, but before it took a little while actually redid in order to get it to show up. So it would be nice if there’s a drop down here so that I could choose my state or choose my abbreviation. Not necessary, but I’d like to see that.
It’s just kind of what I’m accustomed to on a lot of other checkout pages. All right, let’s go ahead and make the purchase. All right, so there we go. I placed an order. You can see there’s been no stripes set up here.
I didn’t have to go create a third party account login paste in keys. That actually is very, very easy. I like that experience. I get the button here to download my content and when I do this, it takes me to a page right here that shows me the files that are available. I can click download and it’s actually just playing the video for me right away.
So everything is functioning properly here. I can see a timeline of when everything took place and I can generate an invoice if I wanted to have a paper receipt or a trail of my order here for tax purposes. So back over in my Lemon squeezy account, I can head over to orders and I’m going to see a list of all of the orders that I have. The customer name shows up here marked as paid. I can see how much revenue was generated from that sale.
If I click on the triple dots here, I can refund the payment or resend the receipt. If people didn’t receive the receipt or generate an invoice there for my customer, I did receive an email receipt instantly upon ordering. It looks very professional. I didn’t need to customize anything. Keep in mind that my company logo would show up here if I had to set up my logo before actually creating a product and selling it.
So that actually might be a point of optimizing the user experience that I Would point out inside of their setup tutorial. It has you create the first product, share your first product and get paid, but they actually have you fine tune your store settings later on in the experience. So we might want to do that the other way around, right? You might want to have someone create their store, add their logo, set things up, then create their first product. I understand just wanting people to get going, but I think most people would be happy to just upload their logo, kind of go through the routine of making things feel like their own.
It’s like nesting, right? When you get a new home or something, you want to decorate it with your own style. That is the idea that I’d love to see them use inside of their set up guide here. But otherwise it is nice to have have a list of things that I Need To do in order to get rocking and rolling. So next on the list here is to get paid.
How do I enable payouts? So let’s click on this. All right, so very nice here. I can either connect my PayPal account or I can connect my bank account. It says I have no upcoming payments, obviously, because the first sale had just come through, so it is still pending.
Let’s go ahead and connect my bank account and see what that process is like. All right, so they are using Stripe to manage their Payouts, which you could kind of guess just from the user your interface of the checkout. Let’s go ahead and connect things up here. So it looks like in order to connect my Strip account, I just have to add my cell phone number. Let’s go ahead and do that.
And then it’s asking me to log into my Strip account. So now that I’m logged into my Strip account, it took me back to Lemon Squeezy and they’ve sent a verification code to my phone number and now they’re asking for a little information about my business. Okay, so just after answering a few questions, basically the name of the business, name of the business owner, last four digits of social and my bank account information, I was able to connect up my bank. And all in all, it took about 30 seconds or so. So now I’m able to get paid and we’re ready to move on to the next step of the process here, which is to actually fine tune the store, connect my email provider so I can use third party services.
We already talked about discount codes, so we don’t need to do that. And then we can do some further design of the store. Let’s finish up the setup wizard here with the store settings. All right, so we’ve got our avatar. Let’s go ahead and upload this.
All right, so I added my little logo here. We’ve got our store name, our slug. This will be the prefix to Theleman squeezy.com. I would like to see some custom domain names. Obviously, that’s going to be something people want as they use this out to do the more advanced features they’re offering, like building out entire websites, online courses, things like that.
Then we’ve got our country, our currency, and a contact email here. It looks like our integrations at this point are limited to mail, shimp, and ConvertKit. I would highly recommend ConvertKit if given the choice between those two, but obviously I’d like to see some more options as well. Go ahead and save these changes back over in the setup. Yeah.
Connecting up your email provider. If I click on this, it’s taking me to the same screen as we just saw. So that’s kind of another redundancy in the UX. I got to say that the user experience of lemon squeezy is really, really nice, and I’m being extremely nitpicky here, but I’d like to see this cleaned up a little bit. Either give me a separate screen for integrations or just make it all the same box here.
We don’t really need two different checkboxes that go to the same screen. All right. Discount codes we already looked at when we were creating the product. The last step is to design the store. Let’s check this out.
So the store, of course, being that slug that we just looked at, that kind of subdomain profitabletoolsquesy.com. We can see our product in here, and we can choose a different store header if we like. Let’s go ahead and upload something here. It looks like it needs to be 1600 x 300. So just to test things out here, I just grabbed a banner that I already had for facebook, and it definitely does not fit the correct dimensions here.
I didn’t even see what the file format was. So you’d want to size that appropriately. Unlike, say, using a facebook header, there’s no way to kind of move this around once it’s uploaded to have it fit if you overshot your sizing a little bit. So I highly recommend fitting the 1600 by 300 size exactly. And then just uploading from there, of course, you can just turn off this header altogether if you want.
When you do that, you just see your logo. I don’t think that looks very good, so I’d probably recommend adding a header. We’ve got toggle switches over here to hide the logo, hide the store name, and hide the store description, which I haven’t even added yet. So this is what the store description looks like. Let’s go ahead and add the store name and the store logo back in.
All right, that’s looking pretty good. The last few options on our store design is to show a subscription form. I’m not really seeing where that will be, but let’s go ahead and check out the page in a second here. I’ll leave that on. We can change the size of these thumbnails of our products right here.
This is medium. I can go to small or I can go even bigger, large being quite large. If I want to add some product details in here here, I assume that will probably show my description. Yeah. All right, so that’ll give you a little bit more information on each product.
All right, so I just went ahead and published changes here. We’re going to go ahead and check out what the store looks like live. Now, I’m very curious what this is going to look like in a mobile response view. Now obviously my header looks pretty terrible right now and that is my own fault. But I’m curious what is going to happen when we go to Mobile View, because even if I had sized the header appropriately, we only have the one size.
So it’s either going to shrink down the image in a scaled way or we’re going to end up cropping off some of the sides and it didn’t really give us any indication of what was going to happen with that mobile view. So if you upload, say if you’ve ever had a YouTube channel and you upload a file to YouTube, it will tell you the safe zones for mobile and tablet and desktop. Or on Facebook you can move it around to kind of fit things just right. But even then it’s difficult to get it looking good on all platforms. So that is the issue of having one image that’s a header image for multiple size screens.
So yeah, just checking this out in mobile it looks really good. Other than the header image is obviously only showing the very center of the image. So just keep in mind if you are setting up a lemon squeezy store, you’ll want to keep any necessary content centered right in the middle of your graphic and then everything else on the side should probably be more decorative. It would be really nice to get some guidelines for that. Maybe a safe zone or a template you could download to make sure that you upload the proper heading.
But as it is, I’ve got a URL that I can share here. I’ve got my own store. I set it up in just a matter of minutes. This is a great way to get going if you want to sell digital products online and not have to deal with the hassle of creating your own WordPress website, which I love, I love WordPress and it has a lot of benefits to it. But if you just want to get going, kind of test out the waters.
I think this is a really good alternative at this point considering that you only pay when you make sales. If you’re signing up for the free account. So can’t beat that. So there you have it. That is lemon squeezy.
Overall, a very impressive and clean experience from beginning to end. I am very interested to see what they do when it comes to online courses. Email marketing, marketing. Automation. These are some very large features.
They’re standalone products for most big companies. So if they’re able to take this lemon squeezy, very simple approach and apply it to things like doing marketing automation, well, this could definitely be a platform to watch in the future. So my eyes are definitely on you. Lemon. Lemon Squeezy.
Let’s see how things turn out. I’ll make sure to update this video when those features are launched. Let me know what you think of lemon squeezy. Is there a competitor that you think does a better job right now? Let’s start the conversation in the comments down below.
Of course, you can always sign up for the newsletter and the Facebook group, which are always free. Links in the description below. And that’s going to do it for this one. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next video.
